Separated at Birth: America and Drakia

[sloreck]

The large emigrations from Southern and Eastern Europe, roughly from the early 1870s to the early 1900s, mostly to the USA but also other destinations were spurred in the USA by the rapid industrial expansion and the need for labor. Additionally there was the attraction of the free land of the west via the Homestead Act. As Drakia expands industrially, there is the large native population to exploit as serfs (in reality chattel slaves) so the need for unskilled labor from Europe is pretty minimal. Skilled/educated immigrants may be courted, but the "huddled masses" described in the poem on the base of the Statue of Liberty not very much. To the extent farmland is available, I expect most will be parceled out in larger "plantations", not open for homesteaders like in the USA. Some of the immigrants to the USA, like the post-1848 Germans were leaving Germany because of the failure of the liberal revolutions, and would not find the atmosphere in Drakia, even at this time, congenial.

 

[TRH]

This stab at a more realistic Draka is equal parts horrifying and, well, horrifying. Nicely done. Of course, the fact that this seems to be taking a more rigorous approach than Stirling used suggests that the Drakians won't necessarily develop into invincible super-Nazis.

I guess the big question for the future will be whether they can develop a somewhat less brutal method of interacting with the native population. What they've come up with now allays British scrutiny and is sufficient to keep a peacetime economy humming, but you have to wonder what would happen were they to get into a total war situation where every ounce of manpower is precious. How will they avoid crippling rebellions or even just strikes at that point? Pitting black Africans against each other would be key, I suppose.

 

[Coley]

The large emigrations from Southern and Eastern Europe, roughly from the early 1870s to the early 1900s, mostly to the USA but also other destinations were spurred in the USA by the rapid industrial expansion and the need for labor. Additionally there was the attraction of the free land of the west via the Homestead Act. As Drakia expands industrially, there is the large native population to exploit as serfs (in reality chattel slaves) so the need for unskilled labor from Europe is pretty minimal. Skilled/educated immigrants may be courted, but the "huddled masses" described in the poem on the base of the Statue of Liberty not very much. To the extent farmland is available, I expect most will be parceled out in larger "plantations", not open for homesteaders like in the USA. Some of the immigrants to the USA, like the post-1948 Germans were leaving Germany because of the failure of the liberal revolutions, and would not find the atmosphere in Drakia, even at this time, congenial.

That makes a lot of sense,I remember that a lot of the German and Italian settlement in southern Brazil settled in clusters,they weren't assimilated until WW 2,and that by force I believe.

 

[Ephraim Ben Raphael]

Everything is so quiet in Brazil...

Sorry about that, I've focusing mostly on Drakia and America to the detriment of other parts of the world.

What came to mind at first was a greater influence of liberalism, positivism, more utopian socialism (or really more guys sitting in a Parisan cafe and their weird dreams of social utopia filtering back), discourse for centralization, etc; as opposed to Anglo-American political thought resting on say, Jeffersonianism vs Hamiltonianism.

In other words I suppose greater push for negative liberty yet a stronger and more active government to shape society. It fits in nicely with the less isolationism, stronger government, and the larger urban population here.

Positivism occurred to me, utopian socialism did not. We're doing something with the Icarians.

Interesting, so what is there politics right now? Is it something like a Constuional monarchy with a Church and The People Repesentives (through the Red Army) to keep the King in check and doing his duties? Also on another note it may make the Catholic Church Abit less weary of Revolutionary elements what with more examples than the French Revolution and the revolutions of 1838 (which had a anti Clerical undertone many times with the Pope being forced to flee Rome), they may be willing to work with them to gain an understanding.

Good question. The Red Armies won to varying degrees in three places; Germany, Spain, and Italy. In Germany the Reds there have pushed for anti-secularism and a close relationship between the German states to keep France back, they haven't started pushing for greater popular representation yet. In Spain the Spanish Red Army effectively controlled the government after the war (because the king was a kid) and their leader became head of the regency council. They've been pushing Catholicism and anti-secularism hard but they're keeping French innovations like the public school system, ended favoritism of peninsulares in what's left of their empire, and taken steps towards cantonalism. Inevitably the Spanish Cortes wields a lot of power- they generally run the country- and has an elected lower house with property qualifications. In the Italy the Reds created their own government whole cloth after they rebelled against Austria and their leader (a minor Italian noble) became the King of Italy. They have a diet with an elected lower house (property qualification) and an upper house of nobles- most of whom were either pretty minor or not even noble before the revolution. Once again; anti-secular, powerful church, but lots of protections for the lower classes who made up most of the Red Army forces themselves.

My god. That’s horrifying.

Thank you.

Though putting the horror of it all aside, it does explain how Drakia is going to get away with slavery in an era where slavery was viewed as uncivilized. It has a system which is technically not slavery, and which will doubtless be compared by Drakian intellectuals to the likes of the Indian indenture system (a system which, after all, lasted until the early 20th century due to the opposition of Indian nationalists, not to Britain growing a conscience).

The thing is that exploitation/abuse of colonial peoples was so bad in OTL that what Drakia is doing isn't really all that worse. And that says it all.

While it's fascinating seeing the horrific racist trainwreck of a system be set up I'm still hoping that at some point Drakia/Draka's actions register as a threat. Dystopias, like what the Draka-verse turned into, aren't any more realistic than blissful utopias. Hopefully, with America being set up as the Anti-Draka they can stop the Edgelord Domination from conquering the world.

Couldn't agree more. The "boot stomping on the human face forever" isn't possible- sooner or later all governments collapse, all empires fall, and things get better. A permanent utopia or dystopia would require a perfect system to maintain forever, and I don't believe that such a thing can exist. I haven't decided yet whether Drakia will conquer the world or not, but if they dothen we'll keep the TL going until their empire falls.

I'm curious, given that the U.S. has absorbed (or will absorb) two francophone states which kept French, and presumably still retained their Catholic faith, will the U.S. in this timeline not develop as harsh of an anti-catholic sentiment?

Quite right. Anti-Catholic sentiments have been less pronounced from the beginning due to America's closer relationship with France and a less politically active papacy (at least initially). Of course this will self-perpetuate.

Nicely thought out timeline,well written.I wonder if the Drakia will get a larger share of the Italian,German,Russo-German and Swiss immigrants that South America received in mid to late 19th century?

Danke. They may get some, but as @sloreck pointed out Drakia doesn't really have much demand for unskilled labor.

This stab at a more realistic Draka is equal parts horrifying and, well, horrifying. Nicely done. Of course, the fact that this seems to be taking a more rigorous approach than Stirling used suggests that the Drakians won't necessarily develop into invincible super-Nazis.

Thank you! Don't worry I can confirm- the Drakians won't be invincible by any stretch of the imagination.

I guess the big question for the future will be whether they can develop a somewhat less brutal method of interacting with the native population. What they've come up with now allays British scrutiny and is sufficient to keep a peacetime economy humming, but you have to wonder what would happen were they to get into a total war situation where every ounce of manpower is precious. How will they avoid crippling rebellions or even just strikes at that point? Pitting black Africans against each other would be key, I suppose.

 

[President Earl Warren]

Another great Update, well worth the wait. Unfortunately it is probably the most horrifying update yet....

. The Agnew Commission

Good on the Brits getting sensible unfortunately so horrifying and the enabling of the Draka is just the begging and while I don't expect anyone else to reach the heights of evil the Draka get, the other colonies will be very unpleasant places to live if your not a White Anglo Saxon Brit.

New Serfdom.

This is possibly one of the most horrid segments I have seen... Just wow. It truly takes skilled writing to convey that level of Hopelessness and pain. On another note, I see the gaining of Serfs from the Orphans of war establish another troubling part of the Draka: Enslaving whole populations from the conquests of War

Berthold

This guy has been added to my list of Horrifying AH Villians, I'm sure he'll look like a cute little kitten when this is over but he gets the ball rolling...

Calvet

Another member of the Evil Shit stain group, Wonder if hell just stay a minor figure or if hell grow higher in the establishment

was during Last Crusade, as America struggled to settle its own question of slavery once and for all, that they would first see use.

On a non serious note: THANK YOU historians, you give the ACW a suitably epic name.As your reward you get a cookie. On a more serious note: oh shit were getting chemical Weapons

 

[Simeon]

I wonder if Spain will make Cuba and Philippines as separate Cantons. Along with the end of Peninsular supremacy in favour of property requirements, will it mark the beginning of the end of exploitative rule in favour of much more inclusive and responsible governments (with friars – of course)? Asians in Cortes?

Seeing that they're the only other colonial power left, they may do Britain and themselves a favour and declare the Philippines and Cuba integral to Spain so we can call Britain as the sole colonial power.

 

[nandalf]

That makes a lot of sense,I remember that a lot of the German and Italian settlement in southern Brazil settled in clusters,they weren't assimilated until WW 2,and that by force I believe.

What? The Farrapos War wasn't even close to forced assimilation if that's what you're meaning

 

[Coley]

What? The Farrapos War wasn't even close to forced assimilation if that's what you're meaning

No,I meant when the Brazilian government clamped down on non Portuguese media and they moved military units around the country,letting the southerners see rest of country,not the 1830s.

 

[sloreck]

With the hut tax, the Draka have a perfectly legal way to put any and all natives in to debt bondage, and the system where children inherit their parents residual debt is quite active all over the world. Of course this is a fiction as with the sale/transfer of "debt" there is no functional difference between this and chattel slavery. The acceptance of those grotesque human experiments as normative, further moves the Draka in to the mindset that serfs are cattle who think (the phrase from the books). It is worth noting that the poor experimental design, note taking etc of these experiments very much mirrors a good deal of the Nazi medical experimentation in the camps during WWII - most of the data was of no value because of this.(1) It appears certain that going forward, the use of serfs considered recalcitrant or dangerous for medical studies will be normative, and sadly you'll see experimentation on "non-criminal serfs" (pregnant women, children) in order to study various conditions/diseases/theories.

(1) Some of the medical experimentation data was valid due to proper experimental design and data collection. The use of this data has been a very vexing medical ethics issue - do you use this data in furtherance of medical science or does the horrific way in which it was collected mean it is too toxic. A similar issue surrounds the Tuskegee syphilis study as well as other studies using human subjects who were either not given a choice or not adequately informed about the risks/benefits even by previously loose standards.

 

[skarosianlifeform]

Well, the Draka might not be very keen on the mass immigration of poor Europeans (because they don't need it economically), but they will need it (even if they don't want to) at some point, because they won't be able to control entire Africa (while fighting modern wars outside the continent) if they have a ridiculously small number of citizens (like 39 millions, I believe, in canon).

 

[Deleted member 67076]

So Im thinking with Angola and presumably the copperbelt Drakia might be hitting the limits of their logistical expansion for a few decades. Draka are going to be stuck fighting brutal colonial wars in Angola and Mozambique trying to subdue the area. People like the Chokwe do not go down easily.

On the counterpoint news spreads fast in Africa and its likely someone like Msiri in his Reformation/empire building is going to use this to his advantage to court foreign support in modernizing the economy. Same can be said with Zanzibar, although I suspect they'll happily sell slaves to Drakia in exchange for well welled foreign capital in order to expand into the Hinterland of Tanzania and Kenya earlier, with much mor emphasis on Indian/Arab/Persian settlers.

 

[the Imperium of Canada]

I wonder how TTLs equivalent of the American Civil War (assuming there is one) will play out, given Canada's annexation and Georgia being controlled by African-Americans.

 

[Coley]

Well, the Draka might not be very keen on the mass immigration of poor Europeans (because they don't need it economically), but they will need it (even if they don't want to) at some point, because they won't be able to control entire Africa (while fighting modern wars outside the continent) if they have a ridiculously small number of citizens (like 39 millions, I believe, in canon).

If you read the Wilbur Smith books on South Africa/Rhodesia,especially Men of Men and the Angels Weep,the white empire builders had to justify themselves to Whitehall with signed concessions from African kings,like Lobengula,I gather in this timeline it's easier for them with the British hands off policy.

 

[AnonymousSauce]

Well, the Draka might not be very keen on the mass immigration of poor Europeans (because they don't need it economically), but they will need it (even if they don't want to) at some point, because they won't be able to control entire Africa (while fighting modern wars outside the continent) if they have a ridiculously small number of citizens (like 39 millions, I believe, in canon).

A large proportion of those 39M citizens, if not the vast majority, will probably be in the military though, like if the Spartiates and the IDF had a baby.

 

[Mackus]

That's interesting.
I used to contemplate alternate Drakia that would develop somewhat in the direction this one seems to be going.
Not atheistic-nihilist BDSM nightmare with sharp class division Stirling made.
A more traditional society (in many meanings of the word), that keeps its identity as part of Christian European civilization, with various shades and gradients between citizen-warrior-aristocrat and slave-underclass. Something like Latin America in that regard, with multitudes of castes based on ancestry, but with room to bend the system a bit if you had ambition. Also, no gender equality, because it made little sense for highly stratified society to question traditional gender roles. Stirling wanted his lesbian ninjas, I suppose.
I assume this Draka, if it gets foothold in Europe, will not have pillage-and-burn attitude of Stirling's, but will see most European masses as unfortunate dupes of revolutionary rhetoric. Below natural aristocrats like themselves, but above savages of Africa and Middle East.

 

[Mr_Fanboy]

That's interesting.
I used to contemplate alternate Drakia that would develop somewhat in the direction this one seems to be going.
Not atheistic-nihilist BDSM nightmare with sharp class division Stirling made.
A more traditional society (in many meanings of the word), that keeps its identity as part of Christian European civilization, with various shades and gradients between citizen-warrior-aristocrat and slave-underclass. Something like Latin America in that regard, with multitudes of castes based on ancestry, but with room to bend the system a bit if you had ambition. Also, no gender equality, because it made little sense for highly stratified society to question traditional gender roles. Stirling wanted his lesbian ninjas, I suppose.
I assume this Draka, if it gets foothold in Europe, will not have pillage-and-burn attitude of Stirling's, but will see most European masses as unfortunate dupes of revolutionary rhetoric. Below natural aristocrats like themselves, but above savages of Africa and Middle East.

One wonders how they would interact with advanced Muslim societies that they conquer in the Middle East. To whit, might they seem themselves as latter-day crusaders? How high a premium would they place on converting these subjects?

Perhaps part of their desire to expand north from sub-Saharan Africa comes from a romantic desire to seize the mantle of the Roman Empire and establish themselves as the preeminent force of Christendom and Western Civilization, leading them to covet the cities that had been most closely associated with those ideas in antiquity: Alexandria, Athens, Constantinople, Jerusalem, Rome, and the rest. A bit like how it was a long-term foreign policy goal of the Russian Empire to conquer Constantinople and revive the Byzantine Empire. This romanticism could later be informed and altered by pseudo-rationalist eugenics and similar such unsavory ideas, but still. Heck, the Draka may try to justify their brand of serfdom/slavery to Americans and Europeans by saying that, as the true inheritors of Rome, they practice the institution in a colorblind manner, and (very ironically, as they as descendants of American slaveholders) accuse Americans of being the real racists for having ever perpetuated explicitly race-based slavery. It would be a bad faith accusation designed to needle Americans more than anything else, but still.

I should say that I have not started to read this timeline in earnest yet, but I plan to do so momentarily.

 

[Mr_Fanboy]

...and I just read through the updates. Very interesting work! It is nice to see a Draka timeline that recognizes that the Boers would not just immediately fold and assimilate into the initial wave of WASP settlers.

My biggest question with respect to the Draka/Drakians themselves has to do with religion. While I suggested in my prior post that a traditionalist understanding of Christianity might combine with general nostalgia for Antiquity to help spur these people toward conquest in the Mediterranean Basin at some point in the future, the Draka of Stirling's world flirted with neopaganism for a time. Even if the society remains majority Christian, might a form of revived Germanic paganism win over some significant number of converts here? It would make sense as a marriage of both the reactionary element of Drakian society ("we are so traditionalist that we will reject Christianity and return to the religion of our remote ancestors") and the rise of pseudo-scientific racism that seems inevitable - some will reject the universalism implicit in even the most conservative varieties of Christianity and build a faith meant only for the master class. Again, I do not think that pagans would ever become a majority of the population (after all, various forms of the occult became popular in the OTL late 19th and early 20th centuries without leaving much of an impact), it does not seem entirely implausible that such a religion could win over, say, ten percent or so of white Drakians. If Mormonism is a uniquely American religion, this could be the unique Drakian religion. After all, it is not as though these pagans would necessarily get along with the Christians.

Now, speaking of the Abrahamic faiths, I must build upon a question from my prior post: what relationship does Drakian society have with Islam and Judaism?

 

[President Earl Warren]

Personnally I think they will still go Atheist with a Darwinist edge, the societal developments are already begging in Europe and with Eugenics it will no doubt feed into their ego and build more justification for eventual conquest and treatment of there subjects especially when they stop pretending to be educating them and adopt the Cattle that thinks description of them

 

[Mr_Fanboy]

I suppose that we will find out soon enough, but I do wonder if Texas, California, and other Mexican territories will be annexed to the United States. Even if they are not, I imagine that American settlers would still be flooding into them. At the very least, I would not be surprised if they rebel and are established as independent republics.

 

[sloreck]

Well Texas and California both had brief periods OTL as independent republics, although both of them had the desire to be incorporated in to the USA pretty much from the get-go.

As society like the Draka, where you have a relatively small citizen class and a very large serf/slave class will inevitably begin to develop gender equality - it's not really about lesbian ninjas. In the USA, the ACW did a lot for gender equality as with so many men away women had to literally mind the store and take on previously more male roles. Of course WWI and WWII added on to this. Here with basically every physically fit male in the reserve system, and it is inevitable that with Draka expansion reserve units will have call ups for combat duty, the women at home are going to have to be involved in managing farms, businesses etc. Additionally they really need to be competent and comfortable with firearms to deal with any potential serf disturbances. With a relatively thin crust of citizens, the Domination cannot afford to be exclusionary of women in higher (university) education and I expect you'll see female lawyers, doctors, scientists, engineers sooner there than elsewhere. Of course the need for women to have children, and large citizen families would be encouraged, means there are limits on gender equality especially before more modern medicine and so forth however there is no reason this "talent pool" cannot be exploited.

Here you have cultural necessity pushing towards gender equality more strongly and sooner than OTL, at least in the Domination. Unlike Muslim countries, and many other cultural centers, such pushback as their might be towards gender equality will be much weaker. To use the example of Saudi Arabia, where women more or less need to be with a male relative most of the time out of the house, and until recently could not even drive, you have a situation where the talents of half of the population are grossly underutilized. Unlike the Saudis, and if they ever run out of oil money this will be a problem, the Draka at this point can't afford that sort of thinking, and once "equality" happens it won't be reversed.